Sleep training update: 9 months

Little Bear recently went through some additional sleep troubles (she is 9 months old now). After our first sleep training episode, she would usually nurse to sleep. All the sleep training books say not to let this happen because it creates a sleep association; that means that baby relies on nursing to sleep and when they wake up in their light sleep cycle (every 45 minutes), they need the nursing to go back to sleep every time. This was never a problem for us. The many times that Little Bear nursed to sleep, she always was still able to put herself back to sleep on her own when she had her micro-wake-ups throughout the night. So I didn’t worry too much about fixing this since it wasn’t a problem for us. Also, during this time, she would usually wake up once to eat, around 2:30am and would get up between 5:30 and 6:00 for the day.

About a month and a half ago, she got sick three times in succession and also got her first tooth. During this time, when we would lay her in the crib, she would scream (not just cry…scream). For awhile we put her in the Rock N Play, which helped – she would sleep there without crying. Then that stopped working too. Now any time we laid her down she would immediately cry. Because she was sick, we couldn’t do the sleep training that had worked for us before, so we resorted to holding her. Then, when that was too hard, I started sleeping with her in our bed (careful to observe all of the safe bed-sharing practices). During this time, she would usually fall asleep around 8pm and we would hold her until we went to bed around 10, as which point we'd transfer her into bed with me. She would wake up once or twice to nurse in the middle of the night, usually around midnight and 3am. We would get up for the day around 6am. Once she was over the sickness, we gave sleep training another go. The first night, we checked on her after 3, 5, 10 minutes (following the procedure above). When we would go in to check on her, we noticed that it was making her more upset. In other words, she would be starting to calm down, but hearing/seeing us made her start full-blown crying again. So we cut back on the check-ins a little bit. She was mostly crying on and off rather than constant wailing. She finally fell asleep for good about 2 hours after we first put her down. Again, it wasn’t constant crying for the whole 2 hours. She would cry, calm down a little, fall asleep for a minute, wake up and cry, etc. We continued with the sleep training procedure (she would nurse to sleep then we would put her in the crib) for about a week and a half. At the beginning of that time, she would always wake up and cry as soon as she felt the mattress. Then, it got to the point where we could lay her down and she would stay asleep, but she would wake up after an hour or so and cry. Finally, we now seem to be in the stage where we can lay her down and she will stay asleep until she wakes for her first night feeding. I think she is in a growth spurt, because she is waking 2-3 times a night to eat. There is also a 9 month sleep regression that’s associated with cognitive changes (Wonder Weeks), so I think that is playing a role as well. I’m not too worried about the frequent night wakings, because those always seem to pass. I’m just glad that she’s back to sleeping in her crib now.